


Don't Have to Rush

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: Brucemas 2020 [8]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers Tower, Bruce Banner Needs a Hug, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, M/M, Multi, Nightmares, POV Third Person, Post-Iron Man 3, Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:55:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28218831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: "M'fine. Why do you ask?""Because your eyes are kinda... green."Bruce is used to the nightmares. But he isn't used to not being alone.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Brucemas 2020 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2056074
Comments: 8
Kudos: 24
Collections: Brucemas 2020





	Don't Have to Rush

**Author's Note:**

> Day 8, for the Tony/Pepper/Bruce pairing and the prompt "green"

It was silent one moment, lying in the dark.

_ Not safe. _

Shadows drifted across the room, blanketing each shape and twisting them into part of the silence. The silence that was  _ too _ silent, that could shatter like glass from the weight of every thought that chased its way untethered from a mind that was normally too well controlled to allow it. A mind that was normally held together—forced itself to be, minute by minute by hour by day—but couldn’t keep from letting go forever. Not while unguarded, relaxed—exposed like a nerve. 

_ Danger. _

Something was wrong, something had changed. It wasn’t safe here, not anymore, and he had to move, had to get away—there wasn’t much time, but he was frozen and—

_ Boot-clad footsteps slamming into the hard-packed dirt, one after the other getting louder and louder as they grew ever closer— _

Fists clenched in the sheets, gripping fabric nearly hard enough to tear.

_ The rapid fire of gunshots; bullets punching circles of light into blackened wood— _

Muscles tensed, unconsciously tightening up, tucking down as though to hide, to run.

_ The sharp thudding of helicopter blades slicing through the quiet as indistinct voices shout his name  _ not his name _ his name and in the thick blurring cascade of noise and color and flooding ice pounding through his veins he can’t tell whether those voices dripped with fear or anger; can’t tell which was the more accurate mirror of himself, and none of that would matter soon, because he had to run he had to move he had to get out of here before— _

Eyes popped open, and Bruce sat up so quickly that his skull nearly bumped against the headboard. He blinked frantically, open and shut and open and shut again, squinting into the fuzzy blackness and struggling breath after breath into his lungs. The splash of cool air when he twisted out from the blankets was quick to sink down into a mire as cold sweat coated his skin, and everything else was deafened by the pounding heartbeat in his ears.

_ Where _ —

Senses were returning, waking up already on alert. The feeling of fabric, a twisted tail of it, latched tightly in his fingers; the quiet sounds everywhere that were all electronic, all mechanical, all expertly designed to be as unobtrusive as possible—but he could still hear it, hear the low hum of the air conditioning and the hiss of the vents and the click of wires spread like nerves throughout the wall; the pitch darkness that seemed to press against his eyes like a tangible weight—and that wasn’t for no reason, was it, it was an instinct learned from the knowledge that the dark was a tool just like anything else, was a weapon just like anything else—

It was dark here. This place. Where he was. 

It was dark, and he was in a bed, and  _ why _ was he in a bed—especially such a soft one, an expensive one, one that wasn’t a blanket balanced atop metal rods or a worn sleeping bag shoved in the corner and peppered with holes that hadn’t been patched quite well enough. 

He shouldn’t be here, it didn’t make sense. Inductive reasoning could trace that wherever Bruce Banner’s life might end up, it wouldn’t be anywhere so… unblemished. 

The pattern was undeniable—feeling wrecked, feeling torn up, and letting it all spill out around him in a crater of devastation. One moment he was a stowaway taking up the least space he could, catching glimpses of restless sleep as the bumps in the road jarred the truck up and down, and the next he was sprawled on the ground in an unfamiliar field, scraps of wrecked metal lying visible by the edge of the road. It had been the same story for the buildings left half-standing at the edges of a village in Kolkata, the uprooted pine trees and fist-size holes gouged out of the snow in a wild stretch of the Arctic, the dingy shower in a cheap motel room in Appalachia where—thankfully—the only damage done had been when he’d slammed his head against the bathroom tile and puked up a flash drive into the sink. 

Of course, that last time, Betty had been there to comfort him. Just another person he’d hurt.

He was lucky when he dreamed of the destruction and not the bodies.

He swallowed, shoving it down past the sudden threatening revulsion. When he ran his hand across his face, he could feel the sweat prickling on his skin, and his heart was still beating precariously fast, determined to keep pounding out that repeating message of  _ move, get away, you’re in danger if you stay, you are danger if you stay,  _ move—

And Bruce was about to, was probably right on the verge of kicking himself out of this bed. Whether he’d make for a hiding place or an escape route hadn’t been decided yet, but he had learned that running was useless when the person he was running from was essentially himself, and hiding was ruled out for much of the same reasons.

It didn’t matter, anyway. It didn’t matter, because his muscles protested the movement when he attempted to slide off, and at first he wondered wildly if he might still be asleep, might still be dreaming that he was frozen and rooted to the spot as danger shrieked from every direction, including inward. 

But he was awake—he was just a little sore, carrying that extra weight of exhaustion that was unique to his situation. As though for the first twenty-four hours after a transformation, those extra thousand pounds of solid green muscle were still pressing down on him, trapping him on the inside in a role reversal that might’ve been called ironic if he’d had the energy to think about it enough. 

But he couldn’t afford that—he could feel the prickling static around his eyes and the black-spotted blurs that meant it had been more than a while since he’d slept properly (and any progress he  _ had _ made on that particular front had probably been wiped out by whatever transformation he’d had last), but there wasn’t  _ time _ for that, there was never time for that, and he had to move—

And he did, or at least he started to—he was in the process of untangling himself from the kneaded-up sheets when the slight rustle of movement caught his attention and he froze. 

The mattress settled up and down as weight shifted on the far side of the bed, and then a sleepy voice murmured “Hey, what’s going on?” as Pepper stretched awake.

_ I’m at the Tower. _

A too-fast breath caught somewhere in his throat as his memory skipped forward the right number of days, and the click of rifles and rumble of tank treads and flash of harsh fluorescent lights on the ceiling of a military base faded back to the edges just the slightest bit. 

He had to calm down. More than that marginal amount, because that wasn’t  _ enough— _

The blanket-covered shape in between Bruce and Pepper rolled over, arms peeking out from where they’d curled beneath the pillow, and Tony was sitting up, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. The blue circle of the arc reactor glowed just brightly enough to be seen beneath his tank top as the blanket fell away.

“And whatever it is, it couldn’t wait until it isn’t four thirteen in the morning?” Tony’s half-grumble was punctuated by an unsuccessfully stifled yawn. 

Pepper poked him, but didn’t take her eyes off Bruce. She shifted so that she was sitting further upright; her hair had probably been gathered in a loose ponytail when she’d gone to sleep, but now it hung freely and slipped over her shoulder when she moved. She continued to watch him, a furrow appearing between her brows, and it took Bruce a moment to realize that he was still rigidly bracing himself against the edge of the bed, ready to slide off.

With an enormous effort, he forced himself back on the bed, drawing his limbs in close. He’d intended to leave as much space as he could between himself and the Pepper-and-Tony cluster on the other side of the bed, but Tony closed that distance easily.

He scooted closer, peering into Bruce’s face. “You okay there, Brucie?”

Bruce nodded. He jerked his head up and down, at least, but neither Tony or Pepper looked satisfied, and it was a struggle to even pull the words from his throat. To turn his head and speak to Tony and Pepper instead of the crook of his arms. “M’fine.”

A shudder went through him as though to disprove his statement, and he wrapped his arms tighter around himself before he felt like he could continue speaking without the words starting and stopping over each other. “Why do you ask?”

Tony’s hands were picking apart a loose thread. Bruce didn’t even know how Tony had managed to  _ find _ a loose thread in these ridiculously expensive blankets, but he was practically tearing it out—seemingly without realizing—as his gaze flitted over Bruce. “Because your eyes are kinda… green.”

Bruce inhaled sharply.

“That’s all, though; there’s nothing else,” Tony kept going. “You’re fine, yeah? You just said you’re fine, so I will be holding you to that. Honesty is key in a relationship and all that, so we should definitely proceed under the assumption that everything is—”

Pepper cut through Tony’s background rambling, her tone threaded with worry. “Bruce, breathe.” 

Only when she said it did Bruce remember, dragging in a sluice of air that did nothing to abate the rush of panic as the unmistakable signs of an impending transformation continued to pound through his body. 

His eyes were already green, but he could feel the color begin to bleed out and trickle through the veins down his neck, around his arms. The mattress creaked, and Bruce felt a flash of fear that he was already beginning to grow, to shift, to bulge outward and probably tear this bed in half—but he wasn’t there yet; there was still time to stop it, and he was supposed to have protocols for this, supposed to have all those techniques and practices: counting breaths, counting heartbeats,  _ focusing, _ and under no circumstances… under no circumstances doing  _ exactly what he was doing.  _

Bruce’s hands dug into his hair, fingers slotting to the back of his head, and a noise escaped his throat as everything in front of him seemed to narrow and expand all at once. 

_ Not now _ , he shouted at the rumbling growl rising to a crescendo in the back of his brain, but of course he didn’t listen—the Hulk never did. Except sometimes to Steve or Tony during a mission, but those were extenuating circumstances and— _ stop that you need to concentrate— _

He was trying, he really was, but he wasn’t in control when he was asleep, and although a nightmare ( _ a flashback _ ) like the one he’d just had usually wasn’t enough to warrant a full transformation all on its own, that risk was compounded with the lingering stress from yesterday’s battle and the shock of waking up in an initially unrecognizable place—and besides, there was no real  _ quantification  _ for these things. He had tried for years, the scientist part of him observing and measuring and collecting all the data that was possible given the sheer amount of variables, but when the Hulk was involved… all of that might as well be thrown to the wind.

He’d  _ known _ it, he’d  _ known _ it was a risk to sleep with Tony and Pepper, but the part of him that was lonely and tired and desperate for warmth—which was all of him, really; no need to pretend when he was this far gone—had wanted it so badly, and they had tugged him in with whispers and soft touches and promises that weren’t  _ anything _ against the very cold stark reality of right now.

He was going to transform right next to them, and there wasn’t anything he could—

Something touched his back and Bruce tensed even more, a shudder rippling outward from his spine—but this something was a hand, slightly rough and scarred from years of workshop accidents and inventions gone wrong, but warm and solid and—

And then Tony’s voice seemed to float to him from a very far distance, and Bruce latched onto it even as the last vestiges of control seemed to be water in cupped hands. 

“Is this okay? The touching thing, I mean. Increase or decrease on the Banner-panicking scale?”

“Yes,” Bruce managed.

The hand stilled on his back. “Yes to which one?”

Any other time, that phrase from Tony Stark might’ve been sarcasm in its highest form, but now it was startling in its sincerity.

“The second one. Decrease.” Bruce took in another breath. Maybe things would be okay. Maybe it was safe here, maybe the slightest release in the clench of his hands against the sheets was for real, maybe Avengers Tower wouldn’t be on the news tomorrow for utter destruction.

_ Pull yourself together, Banner; this is not the time or place to fall apart.  _

Everyone thought he was in control—and he was, to an extent, but it  _ wasn’t that simple. _

How could anything about this situation ever be expected to be simple?

Pepper again, hovering with her hand half-outstretched toward the edge of the bed. “Should we turn on a light?”

Bruce thought about the harsh glow of burning red aimed and ready to fire, the crosshatched beams of gold flushing him out of the shadows, and vehemently shook his head. His heartbeat began to speed up again.

The floor creaked, over by the opposite side of the bed, and then Pepper was crawling in on Bruce’s other side, she and Tony each forming their half of a bookend. Maybe Bruce should’ve felt confined, but something about this position felt strangely… protected. 

“Better?”

Bruce nodded shakily in the direction he thought Pepper’s voice had come from. He shifted, intending to dislodge Tony’s hand from against his back, but somehow the opposite happened and he ended up with two hands there instead. Pepper’s hand was a little smaller—he disjointedly remembered some story about changing the arc reactor that had been subsequently forbidden as a breakfast conversation—but both hers and Tony’s were soothing in a way that nothing else had been in years, if ever. Bruce couldn’t help but to lean into it.

“Am I still—” he asked, and he felt more than saw Pepper’s wince.

“Teeny bit.” She peered closer, her tone shifting to surprise. “Oh. It’s going away.”

Bruce blinked, pressing his eyes shut a little harder than was necessary, as though he could squeeze out all the remaining green like drops of blood from a wound. 

His shoulders slumped as he let out a breath, and none of them moved for a long moment. There was nothing but the careful slide back and forth of hands against fabric, nothing but the  _ thud _ of his heart gradually evening out, beat by beat.

Finally, Tony broke the silence. “Well, that was a hell of a wakeup call.”

There was no judgement in his voice, but Bruce groaned anyway. “I’m sorry.”

He made to get out of the bed, but Tony was talking again before his feet even touched the floor.

“Hey, where’re you going?”

Bruce half-lifted one shoulder. “If there’s anything that justifies sleeping on the couch—”

“Come on, Bruce, we aren’t kicking you out.” Pepper sounded like she was about to fall asleep again, leaning her head back against the pillow. Her hand slipped further down Bruce’s back, but didn’t entirely fall away. 

She said something else, too—maybe “far from it,” but her exact words were incoherent through a yawn.

Bruce really didn’t want to drag this into a whole thing. Not when it was the crack of dawn, not when all three of them were sporting the same dark circles under their eyes after the exhaustion from yesterday’s battle—which Pepper might not have actively fought in, but Bruce could attest to the fact that watching from the sidelines, especially watching someone you  _ cared _ about from the sidelines, was draining in its own way. 

Yesterday… yesterday hadn’t been great. 

Those weren’t even Bruce’s words—that had been JARVIS’s initial evaluation of the six bruised and beaten-up Avengers stumbling through the front doors once they’d done as much as they could outside. 

Whatever security cameras had been active in that hallway had certainly captured a memorable scene: Tony missing sections of armor like loose puzzle pieces, his bare left arm and right leg bruised up and down where said armor was  _ supposed _ to cover; Steve with half his uniform burned away, the super-serum-enhanced skin beneath a shiny pink (and hadn’t Captain America on fire been a sight); Clint with probably four or five separate concussions and practically leaning on Thor as he did his best approximation of walking, which incidentally might have been another person’s best approximation of falling on their face; Natasha determinedly limping her way to someplace she could grab onto the wall for support, missing the wall, waving away anyone else’s help, and finally slumping cross-legged on the floor and shutting her eyes; Thor with a wound vaguely pinpointed to be around the stomach area but that he refused to let any of the others see, even though every single one of them had played witness to one of the alien mutant things try to bite through his internal organs; and Bruce very naked, very confused, and very ready to collapse on the spot. 

Not great.

They’d patched up whatever injuries advanced healing couldn’t fix, ignored all fifty-one combined calls from S.H.I.E.L.D. (Steve had actually tried to answer one of them, but Natasha had yanked away his phone before he could hit “Accept Call”), replaced the items of clothing that had been set on fire, speckled with alien teeth marks, or otherwise lost and destroyed (Bruce went into fights expecting to need new clothes when he came out of them, but this mission’s… uniqueness had meant that somehow only Clint was left fully dressed), and made vague noises and hand gestures at each other before promptly vanishing off to their respective beds and/or showers. Bruce hadn’t seen any of the Avengers except Tony since then. 

It had been late when they’d finally returned to the Tower, late enough that Bruce had been surprised Pepper was still awake. Apparently, she’d been dividing her time between preemptively handling the inevitable PR entanglements—probably alongside her usual work—and keeping the news running in the background, and although she was a positive beam of energy compared to Bruce and Tony, she still looked dead on her feet. 

Once the initial reassurance that Tony was fine, that Pepper was fine, that Bruce was fine, that everyone was alive, that they would probably not have to worry about mutated alien things attacking Central Park in the near future was over, there had been the obligatory segue into the discussion of sleep. By that point, it had been… a late hour, but all three of them had been shaken up enough that Tony had made a beeline for the workshop to fix his suit and Pepper had murmured indistinctly about finishing up her work and Bruce hadn’t bothered with an excuse because he hadn’t thought anybody would mind—or notice—if he simply did not sleep. 

Of course, while all of them had intended a sleepless night while they worked off their post-assembling stress, each of them had insisted the other two go to bed. Other people caring about them in that way had been something of a novel experience for all of them, and it was with exhausted disbelief that the three-way argument—which had already been half-hearted at best—had culminated with a compromise and all of them ending up in the bed. The beds in Avengers Tower were large on principle, but this one seemed the perfect size for three.

The Avengers had been a team for months, and Tony and Pepper had been dealing with the superhero element for years (and Bruce would… get back to that later), but the battles still left them all a little tense, a little shaky, a little disconnected from reality. 

That was probably why Bruce had had the nightmare in the first place—it had been an awful cycle while he was on the run: freak out, transform, cause damage, freak out about the damage he’d caused, be unable to sleep because of the resultant nightmares until either the stress of not sleeping or giving in only to shoot awake with a cry already deepening to a roar caused him to transform again. That was how it had been in the early years, anyway; he’d managed to tamp that down, to deal with it, to  _ live _ with it, to make it to that full year of no incidents that had been promptly ruined by the arrival of Natasha and the Avengers and the helicarrier and S.H.I.E.L.D. and Loki. 

He’d gotten good at it; if there was one thing he was good at in his life, it was adapting. And so he had—but it wasn’t foolproof. 

It could never be foolproof, and so Bruce started to get out of bed without waiting for further argument.

Pepper peeked up at him. “I literally just said don’t go anywhere.”

“She did say that,” Tony piped up. “I am the witness.”

Bruce stared at them, back and forth and back and forth. “How are you not freaked out?” His eyes weren’t green anymore, but they might as well have been.

“Of course we’re freaked out.” Pepper said it like it should have been obvious. “Any sane person would be a little freaked out by that.”

Tony raised one finger. “Actually, is it just me, or isn’t that whole glowing-green-eyes thing kind of a turn-on?”

“See my previous statement.” Pepper looked at Bruce again, and her expression turned more serious. “Unless  _ you _ don’t want to sleep with us, I don’t want anybody to be uncomfortable—”

“I’m not uncomfortable,” Bruce said. If only that was the problem. “I’m just saying that maybe right after missions it’s not the best idea to be around me. In a vulnerable-ish state. Without a whole lot of—” he peered around the darkened bedroom “—precautions.”

“Believe me, you’re not the only one who’s a hazard to sleep with.” For some reason, Pepper shot a look at Tony as she said that, but she was too tired to put any real heat into it. 

Tony rolled over to face her. “First of all,  _ hey. _ Second of all, I reprogrammed the suits from responding to distress signals given while asleep anymore.”

Bruce blinked. “Did I… miss something?”

He had the very odd feeling that a silent conversation was taking place without him for a long minute.

“It’s not important,” Tony finally said. “I think Pep’s point was we’ve all got our things. Your, uh, friend, my—”

“Unreasonable recklessness in the name of hero-ing and scientific curiosity,” Pepper interjected.

“Well, on that front you’re outnumbered,” Tony pointed out. Bruce smiled in spite of himself as Tony finished. “And Pepper’s incurable habit of stealing the blankets when my feet are very cold.” He gave a yank to the comforter as though to illustrate his point.

“Those are very different things,” Bruce said. “Please tell me you can see how those are very different things.” He received only sleep-thickened mumbling in answer as both Tony and Pepper seemed to sink further into the mattress, and he felt bad about it, but he had to press: “What would you guys have done if I’d transformed?”

He was pretty sure that even Tony wouldn’t hide an Iron Man suit in his pajamas.

Tony frowned and cast a surveying look around. “Well, it is a pretty large bed. I’m sure we could fit the big guy in here.”

Bruce and Pepper’s “ _ No _ ” was in almost perfect unison. 

It was silent after that. Silent for long enough that Bruce got suspicious.

“Are you two actually falling asleep?”  _ How. How can they  _ do _ that with me right here, when they just saw— _

He was beginning to think that the three of them together maybe formed about eighty percent of the self-preservation required for one human person. There had never been much hope for Tony, but Pepper at least had been going strong.

Now, though, she just nodded. “Mm-hm.” She gave a pat to the empty pillow next to her, as though to indicate that Bruce’s head belonged there. 

And that was a  _ bad idea _ it was such a bad idea and he should at least try to get to the containment room if he was going to lapse in control again and if nobody else was going to be responsible and follow safety precautions then he should really—

And Bruce didn’t remember consciously making the decision, but suddenly his head was on the pillow and his eyes were starting to drift closed, the weight of it finally abandoned and sending an almost physical response of relief through a body that hadn’t quite recovered from yesterday’s Hulk-smashing. 

Tony’s sleepy voice came from Bruce’s other side, and Bruce was honestly surprised that he was still awake enough to hear it.

“Yay, Pep, we did it,” Tony whispered, and there was a rustling movement before a shadow fell over Bruce’s face.

Pepper didn’t respond for a solid three seconds, and when she did, it was muffled by the obvious effort of stifling laughter. “Are you trying to high five me?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s pitch black in here, you lunatic, go to sleep.”

Another rustling noise as Tony evidently tucked his hand back under the covers.

Beat.

“Bruce, you’d high five me, wouldn’t you?”

Bruce pulled the top blanket up and over his shoulders. “No, I wouldn’t, because it’s pitch black in here and I’m asleep.”

“You’re not asleep. You’re talking.”

“Maybe I’m talking in my sleep.” And that was when Bruce felt Pepper’s arm start to curl around him, and he went still for a moment before slowly relaxing into it. This could be okay. Maybe, hopefully, unless-something-went-terribly-wrong—but it could be okay.

He was very aware of both the warm bodies on either side: the rise and fall of breaths, the flutter of eyelids, the whisper of sheets shifting as they all coalesced further into a singular unit. It was in the cup of Bruce’s head under Tony’s chin, in the fold of Tony’s arm reaching around Pepper’s shoulders, in the clasp of Bruce and Pepper’s hands beneath the covers. It was still—as had been mentioned multiple times—pitch black, but there were so many senses left to hear and touch. To feel the rhythm of three heartbeats: one normal, one cloaked by metal, one pumping legally defined radioactive biohazard.

That was what okay meant, sometimes, and it was there that Bruce finally felt safe.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!   
> This is my last fic for Brucemas, so extra thank you to everyone for reading/commenting/kudos-ing! <3


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